miscellaneous thoughts in no particular order

I've been having nightmares lately. The kind where you wake up, and this awful feeling of residual fear or dread or anxiety stays with you well after you've gotten out of bed and begun to go about your day. I haven't had nightmares in many months — at least — and I don't remember ever having ones like this, that affect me long after I wake up. Part of me wonders why I've been having them all of a sudden, and part of me doesn't want to think about it.


Drag blues feels amazing. It reminds me of ballroom, and I miss ballroom. Specifically it reminds me of tango, and I think it's because of the nature of the connection. A lot of the lead/follow seems to rely not on the arms at all, but rather on connection through the legs and torso. I really like it... perhaps not surprisingly, considering that my arms are pretty much the bane of my dancing existence. (Sigh.) In any case, I'm dying to learn more blues. I think it's already changing my dancing in general. I've hardly been out dancing salsa lately, but recently I danced a really great bachata (with a ballroom instructor, incidentally), and it felt different from the last time I danced with him — certain things felt easier and more natural to follow, more effortless... and from the feel of those things, it was definitely a direct result of the drag blues workshops I did not long ago (taught by some amazing instructors from Denver).


I need to develop more discipline (i.e., an amount greater than zero). I know I have enough time to do a good number of the things I want to be doing these days without continually getting myself sick (I've long since lost count of the number of times I've been sick since last summer... it is definitely greater than eight), but I've barely been accomplishing anything, and it's really starting to bother me. I'm barely treading water, let alone getting anywhere. I seem to have completely lost the ability to be productive on a regular day. This is not sustainable. I fear the only solution is sheer will power.


Eu não vivo onde moro; eu não moro onde vivo. I feel like my life is in one place, and my home and school are in another. I don't think it's going to change any time soon. Part of me is scared by that thought; part of me wants to be fine with it. Fortunately(?), if I keep myself busy enough, I manage not to think about this or its implications and just enjoy what I have at the moment.

Morning's here... The morning's here! Sunshine is here...

I love mornings. :D To observe my behaviour, you'd never conclude such a thing. For instance, my last couple weeks have gone more or less like so:

Sunday: wake at 3 pm

Monday: sleep at 7 am; wake at 2 pm

Tuesday: sleep at 11 am; wake at 5 pm

Wednesday: sleep at 4 pm; wake at 6 pm

Thursday: sleep at 6 am; wake at 3 pm

Friday: sleep at 3 am; wake at 12 pm

Saturday: sleep at 7 am; wake at 3 pm

Sunday: sleep at 6 am; wake at 3 pm

Monday: sleep at 5 am; wake at 7 am; sleep at 5 pm; wake at 7 pm

Tuesday: sleep at 8 am; wake at 9 am; sleep at 6 pm; wake at 8 pm

Wednesday: sleep at 5 am; wake at 5:10 am; sleep at 9 pm (!!)

Thursday: wake at 6 am (!!)

Friday: sleep at 1 am; wake at 8 am

I don't quite understand why I always tend to stay up forever into the night, eventually giving in to exhaustion and sleeping sometime in the morning... I guess there's something about the quiet, when everyone else is asleep, that I like, but I most of the time I don't get much (or anything) done when I'm awake really late anyway. Sometimes there's something specific I'm doing such that I stay up forever (e.g., playing guitar), but other times time just somehow elapses, and suddenly it's 6 am, and I wouldn't even be able to describe what I was doing the whole time if you asked me.

I think I need to get into the habit of sticking to a behavioural curfew. Something like "no computer after 10 pm". I really like early mornings, when it's just getting light out (or even before it starts to get light). They're so much better than evenings. They feel so much happier...

I watched a TED Talk yesterday, about lifestyles that are associated with longevity, and (in addition to making me think about what a ridiculously high proportion of the time my body must be under stress -- due to my sleeping habits alone) the speaker talks about the Japanese concept of ikigai, which he, perhaps rather inaccurately, translates as "the reason for which you wake up in the morning"... Now, maybe what he really meant by this description was something closer to a raison d'être, or broader sense of purpose in life (which surely would be a great thing), but even taking it literally: for me it makes such a huge difference simply to have something specific that I want to do when I wake up each day. It's such a great feeling to wake up and to not be able to stay in bed because there are things that you can't wait to do right away. Which is another reason to set a curfew for myself, even (or especially) when there are things I really want to do right that moment, at night.

It's odd... I saw this personality quiz recently (a Which Typeface Are You? quiz, hehe) in which the following question was asked "Are you relaxed -- do you take any chocolate from the box, whether it's orange cream or hazelnut crunch? Or are you disciplined -- do you first suffer the orange cream so you can later enjoy the hazelnut crunch?" I would never think of myself as disciplined (like, at *all*), but I always do the latter. I always eat things I don't like first, saving the best things for last. If this is indeed some kind of manifestation of discipline, maybe there's hope for me yet -- maybe I can make a habit of not only to holding off on enjoyable activities until morning (so I can sleep and wake early :D), but maybe even first doing tasks I don't want to do, getting them over with right away so I can enjoy other things fully afterwards. Wouldn't that be something...

Anything to stop clockwatching...

Holy frig. This is just getting ridiculous. I can't even begin to imagine how I would experience jet-lag, because my internal clock is completely busted as it is. I've become nocturnal. I miss the sun!

I've done the nocturne thing before, but it's always been a 6-am-to-4-pm-sleeping sort of thing (give or take a couple hours)... not sleeping at *noon* and waking at *10 pm*. WTF. At least with getting up at 4 pm, you can call it "staying up late" and "getting up late". Really late, sure, but you're still "getting up late". 10 pm? That's just night-time. There's no denying it. When you wake up at 10 pm, you are waking up *just in time for night*. Ugh. It's awful.

I'd say I'd make a good vampire, but not only am I not pale enough (and, as my brother has kindly informed me, not sparkly enough), I am also not *consistently* nocturnal enough. And it's this fact that really has me messed up lately: I've many times before declared that I've been temporally disoriented, usually when I've been off of school or whatever and days of the week lose all meaning. But at least then you still have *some* sense of the passage of time... like "two sleeps ago I went to the movies"... at least for within the last couple of days, anyway. :| At this point, I only *wish* I could meaningfully count time in sleeps!

The last week or so for me has looked something like this:

Tuesday: sleep at 4 am; wake at 8 am

Wednesday: sleep at 9 am; get rudely awoken (!!) at 10 am; sleep at 12 pm; wake at 9 pm

Thursday: sleep at 1 pm; wake at 9 pm

Friday: nap for ~ 1 hour at 12 pm; sleep at 9 pm

Saturday: wake at 5 am (there's hope!)

Sunday: sleep at 6 am; wake at 7 pm (!!)

Monday: sleep at 8 pm

Tuesday: wake at 2 am (argh...)

Like seriously, WTF? Can any of that be counted as days in *any time zone*? No wonder this stupid sore throat has been lingering all week... But even before I started staying awake for random periods of time before passing out -- while I was just being regular ol' nocturnal -- I started experiencing a phenomenon which I have dubbed, perhaps ironically, the Awake-with-the-World Effect (or AWE, for short).

See, there's a key difference between between "staying up late" and being outright nocturnal, especially if you're prancing on the late edge of nocturnal (i.e., a noon-ish bedtime) instead of diving under the covers as soon as the sun comes up and staying there until it's safely past the horizon. When you "stay up late", everyone else is asleep! You're there on your computer, doing something completely useless for some number of hours, and the World is snoring in its bed. Then eventually you go to sleep, and then the World wakes up and goes on about its business, with you finally arriving fashionably late to the Party of the Living. So you have this nice, albeit short, window of being Awake with the World: between 4 pm and whenever the World goes to sleep. This is what typically defines a Day. Whether you have one hour of post-AW wakefulness or six, it makes little difference to your perception of the passage of Days. (Note that if you're like some people I know, and wake up at 5 in the morning and sleep at 9 pm, exactly the same thing applies, only the World is arriving late to *your* party. ... or you're the lame-O** who shows up super early, before anyone else gets there.)

If you're nocturnal, on the other hand, the World wakes up, and you have a short period of AW before you go to sleep: maybe you have breakfast, chat with your housemates, email a prof, make a phone-call or two. Then eventually you go to sleep. And then you wake up that same "day", to (gasp!) a SECOND period of AW! You have a late dinner with friends (not that it's late for you, since really it's your breaktfast), hang out a while, and then the World goes to sleep. And you proceed to read the entire archive of a webcomic that started in 2002, until finally the World wakes up again. But when is this new period of AW taking place? Is it AW1 of the World's "day", or AW2 of your "day"? Do you even feel each continuous period of wakefulness as if it's a "day", despite being detached from the World for a long period smack in the middle of it? Or do you start counting AWs instead of "days"?

Or do you just sort of lose all sense of time altogether?

Probably most people don't have much data on which to base an answer to any of this. I unfortunately have collected a fair amount, and yeah... I kind of just lose all sense of time. And I think it's partially because there are twice as many AWs to keep track of as you'd have days to track, partially because there's no particularly natural way to group these AWs meaningfully (i.e., in terms of the World's "days", which is as psychologically unnatural as pairing Tuesday evening with Wednesday morning would be to most people, or in terms of your own "days", which may be a more natural pairing, but isn't really a useful grouping at all, for most purposes)... and partially because anyone experiencing AWE to begin with is probably pretty messed up in the head as it is.

[** I *wish* I could be one of these lame-Os. I get SO much more done in a day, and I feel so much more awake and like the day is so much longer, when I wake up early and go to bed early. It feels great, and I love it. Unfortunately, this early-bird routine doesn't jive well with social dancing, and I right now I couldn't imagine giving up salsa nights for a super-healthy schedule. :|]